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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (46629)	5/24/2004 2:19:28 PM
From: michael97123	Respond to of 794257

" However, before you buy the 'I told you so' line, you should check if what he is saying now bears any resemblance to what he said beforehand. " Hell if i did that i couldnt listen to myself, now could I. I would expect that zinni would have felt that the war itself would be costly. He indicated in the 60 Minutes interview about how superb our folks performed in the war phase. His feeling was and is that the WOT needed to fought locally in Afgan and globally against terror cells and the illegal money trail. He didnt think that we had the assets to fight both in iraq and succeed in the WOT. I cant tell yet if Iraq actually damaged the overall WOT, but the effort certainly broke down after the completion of the military phase. Personally i think its the obligation of each and every one of us to review the basic assumptions we had going into this mess. It could be that military, state, Bush 41 team were less wrong than the DOD/CIA/some neocons in degree of difficulty even if neocons were right in theory. Thats where i seem to be coming down on this. It was a worthwhile war if it was fought "large" enough and if we couldnt fight it "large" enough because of lack of adequate forces for use, lack of good intel, and lack of real allies and logistics (those damn Turks), we shouldnt have fought it on the aggressive time frame we were on. Looking back it seems that democracy can never be a quick fix and is a long process and if we were trying to impress our adversaries with our skills, we did exactly the opposite. No one is shaking in their boots as they may have been on day 1. This admin cannot launch another preemptive war and they have made it so with their lack of skill in iraq. Preemption is a good policy but it requires decisive wins and not sex in the prison or chalabi or dilly dallying with al sadr. Sharon would never find himself in this position, would he? Mike

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (46629)	5/24/2004 2:27:34 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 794257

<<< I didn't see the interview, but I remember Zinni as hewing to the State line - gotta solver Israel/Pal first, stability above all, yada yada. >>> You should have seen him. He is very credible. He is very articulate. He blamed the civilians at DOD for failure in the post war follow up. Isreali Interest would have been much better served with General Zinni than with current bunch at DOD. Current bunch tried to achieve their objectives on the cheap - not providing the necessary resources. That is obivous to any one. They didn't understand the region and they didn't understand the military. All the real Generals (Zinni, Scrowcroft, Powell, Clark, Shenzeki, Swarzkarpf) are all critical of the post war ops. The danger for Isreal is that although US support is currently strong, it is never all that deep. When the proverbial stuff hits the fan, a lot of current supporters will not be there. The backlash could be not good. That is why I have I always thought that Isreal had to maintain the moral high ground - which (IMO) it had until recently. This, they did it first and they did worse stuff is really going to hurt when things get rough. Up until now, Isreal was above reproach - IMO. They were protected in a good way by political correctness. Don't be fooled by all the anti PC crowd - they do not all feel the same way about every topic. General Zinni does not believe in running away from the situation. He believes that the situation can still be corrected. He believes that it is not unpartriotic to speak out agianst bad policies that could hurt our troops.